Abstract

In recent years, Poland witnessed a dramatic decline in its unemployment rate and, from having had one of the worst jobless records in the EU-27, the country now posts a figure below the Union average. However, this remarkable turnaround has apparently been driven by amendments to the country's Labour Code, which have generated an enormous increase in temporary working. On the basis of gross flow data from five consecutive annual panels from the Labour Force Survey, the paper identifies a strong link between this growth and the fall in unemployment. A multinomial logit model then reveals the flows were most heavily concentrated among males and the less well educated. There was also some evidence that fixed-term work lured previously discouraged, inactive individuals back into the labour market. However, the requirement that Poland aligns its temporary employment legislation with that of the EU could conceivable lead to at least a partial reversal of these developments.